Vehicles are often equipped with a display unit or units located at the vehicle dash board or other area of the vehicle that are utilized to provide various user interfaces to vehicle occupants. Many of the user interfaces have different formats and layouts that present users with various shapes, sizes, and locations of input icons through the display unit. In many instances, these display units are operably connected to a touchpad that is remotely located within the vehicle (e.g., in the center panel of the vehicle) in order to provide inputs to the input icons on the graphical user interfaces.
A key limitation of touchpads is that touchpads are relatively mapped to the display unit. For example, when the user touches the touchpad, the touchpad converts the input data into relative coordinate values causing a delayed access to user interface objects of the user interface being shown on a display screen. In other words, a touch input on a touchpad is not registered at the corresponding area of the display screen as it is being inputted on the touchpad by the user. In addition, conventionally only user interface objects are selected when a user drags a cursor to the position of the user interface object on the display. Therefore, no input is received on any of the user interface objects unless the user touch inputs the touchpad by dragging, swiping, and/or moving touch inputs to manipulate the location of the cursor to one of the user interface objects. This limitation can cause areas of the touchpad to not correspond to the user interface input objects without further effort from the user and can cause undue distraction, inefficiency, and frustration for the user, especially in the case of a driver of the vehicle.